Review of one of the earlier dungeon crawls: Gateway to Apshai for the Commodore 64

You have a destiny to fulfill. Will you survive the perilous journey through the gateway to the fabled Temple of Apshai?

This game is one of the best RPG games I've ever played, and along with Sword of Fargoal (another great dungeon crawling game), it claimed many hours of my life, and heavily influenced my passion towards RPG games. This is one of the great ancestors of dungeon crawling games such as Diablo. Whenever you venture into one of the modern video game dungeons, remember - it all started here.

Before writing any review, I would play the game for at least an hour or two to remind myself of its features. At 9:00 PM I inserted the cartridge into my Commodore 64. Ahhh the sight of the good ol' dungeon. The atmosphere... the sound effects... the weapons... the treasures... a few minutes into playing the game and I was totally immersed. Only at 4:00 AM, 7 hours later, I remembered that I had a review to write. Once again, the addictiveness of this game claimed a good portion of my night's sleep. Must... destroy... cartridge...Story

You are not really the heroic type. But this is soon going to change. You have been summoned to the chambers of Merlis, an old priest. The land is dying, cursed with evil monsters and plagues. According to the prophecy, the curse will be lifted once the Temple of Apshai is reclaimed by the son of Apshai's greatest warrior. And that hero is You. Many have ventured into the Temple of Apshai, but none have returned (these are always encouraging words to hear.) The fate of the kingdom rests on your shoulders.

Armed with only a worn dagger and some torn leather armor, you travel east, climb down into a pit, and discover the entrance to the first level of the gateway to the Temple of Apshai. What evil lays beyond these foul gates?

Gameplay

This is a dungeon crawl. The dungeon crawl. You explore the Gateway to the Apshai, navigating a labyrinthic maze, killing monsters and picking up treasure on the way. All rooms and corridors are initially hidden behind darkness, but get illuminated as you explore them. This keeps your pulse pounding. What lays beyond the darkness? The Gateway consists of 8 levels, each consisting of 16 dungeons, each consisting of 60 rooms. That's a lot of rooms to explore! (8 * 16 * 60 = 7680, for those who are not so mathematically inclined). Who knows how many hours of play this game claimed from innocent kids, kids like me who should have probably been doing their homework instead of playing video games.

You start off at the first level, armed with only a dagger and leather armor. In each level, you choose which of the level's 16 dungeons you will explore, making each game different and providing for a very high replay value. As the dungeon level increases, so do the challenges.

As with any RPG, your character has statistics (The exact effect of each of the attributes is not listed in the manual, so this is according to my own experience)

Strength: This determines how hard you hit. The higher the strength, the less blows it will require to kill a monster.Agility: This increases your change to hit and to avoid getting hit.Luck: This affects what treasures you will find and also whether you will take damage from traps.Health: When this drops to zero... guess what?Lives: You start with five lives. When you lose them all, the game is over.

After completing a level, you will sometimes Level Up, increasing one of the attributes and your health points. There are also different items in the game such as charms that can further raise those statistics.

Your first weapon is the dagger, but as you explore the dungeon you will find more powerful weapons. There are melee weapons (such as a short sword, long sword, and two handed sword) and ranged weapons (such as a bow with regular or magic arrows).

Only leather armor protects you when you begin your adventure, but as you journey on, you will find stronger armor such as chain armor and plate armor, as well as shields and helmets. These will reduce the damage you take.

Other artifacts you can pick up include healing potions, maps, and spells.

Last but not least, there are the treasures. Treasures give you points (the objective of the game is to pick up as much treasure as you can while clearing the dungeons). The more treasures you find, the higher your score will be. There are different types of treasures. Treasures made out of gold are worth more than bronze ones. Also, the higher the level in which you find the treasure, the more points it is worth.

Along the way, you will encounter a large variety of monsters and traps. Traps can be found under the floor, under treasures, or other items. There are all sorts of traps including freeze traps, pit traps, and teleportation traps. You have a Locate Traps skill which you can use to reveal nearby traps. You have no way of disarming a trap though (Except perhaps with a disarm spell if you can find one). If there is a trap beneath an item you seek, you'll have to decide whether to risk it or to move on.

Monsters also come in different shape and size. There are thieves, bats, rats, wizards, warriors, giants, undead, mummies, vampires, goblins, snakes and more. At the lower level you will encounter easier foes such as bats and rats, but as you progress you will run into more difficult adversaries. In addition to your weapons, you can find spells that you can use such as stun, fear or paralyze. If you get hit and are about to die, you can sip a healing salve to restore your health. Some rooms might contain hidden doors which you can only locate if you use your search skill. The monster AI, however, is not that great. They will often get stuck behind walls, and you can swing at'em and kill them from the other side of the wall.

You have six and a half minutes to explore each dungeon level. After the time elapses, if you are still alive, you move into the next deeper level. You can also decide to move to the next level before the time is over; however it is your best interest to gather all the weapons and items you can find before advancing to the next level so that you better be prepared for the challenges ahead.

Gameplay is very fun, very addictive.You can easily lose track of time in these dungeons.

Multiplayer

None.

Controls

There is a small learning curve, but once you get used to the controls, it flows smoothly. You move your character around by using the Joystick. You take action by pressing the fire button on the joystick. F3 cycles through your inventory. F5 gives you a list of actions including keys (to open doors), locate trap (self explanatory), search spell (to locate hidden doors), drop item, check supplies (inventory listing), check status (health, lives and attributes), check weapons (to see what weapons and armor you have equipped), and next level (to prematurely advance to the next level). F7 arms a weapon and switches between different weapons types.

I do have a couple of qualms about the controls, though. First off, any action you take sheaths your weapon and you have to hit F7 to arm it again. Many times, I would forget to do that and hopelessly mash the joystick button trying to slay a foe, before realizing that my weapon is sheathed. Second, in order to find out what your health is, or how much ammo you got left, you have to click F5 and go to the Check Status or Check Weapons menu. This can be tedious to do after every battle. There is enough room in the top panel, and I feel that at least the health and weapon statistics could've been displayed there.Graphics

One of the defining games of my youth. I had always been fascinated by this game, but was too young to understand it at first. I didn't really start to play it until after I had started pen&paper roleplaying, and after I had already discovered Rogue on the PC (another true classic!). Must have been '89... What Gateway to Apshai had over Rogue was it being more action-oriented, requiring player skill to actually beat the monsters instead of the pure stat-based Rogue.

And the graphics and sound effects making it so extremely atmospheric and addictive - I've played it for so many hours, from my mid-teens to my early 20's!

There's only one thing that could make it better than it already is. A level editor!

Who knows, now that I'm slowly learning to program games myself, I may breathe some fan-based love into a remake of sorts some day ;)

I played this on my beloved C64 for countless hours of my youth. Must have been around 1987 or 1988. I had forgotten the title and had had to scan through the complete list of C64 games on wikipedia in order to find it again. I'd love to find a way to play this again.

Just a few notes from the programmer/artist/producer/everything else who was responsible for Gateway to Apshai. It remains the favorite of all the games I ever created, simply because of one thing - it was incredible tight and efficient. Remember how long ago this was - all of that stuff fit into one 32K (K, not M) cartrige, and would run with as little as 16K of RAM. Quite an achievement, all things considered.

Level editor? Not a chance. The levels were created from an algorithm, not drawn or otherwise built one by one. You had 16 levels, because I chose those 16 from 65,536 possibilities! The monster AI is fairly lame, because there simply wasn't enough code space to make it better. When it came down to it, I chose quantity over quality almost every time, although I did work hard to make the quality as high as I could. There were certainly many, many areas that could have had majot improvements with a little more RAM, a little more ROM, a little more resources all around. But for a small, cheap cartridge game that worked just as well on a minimal Atari system as a fully loaded Apple, Gateway to Apshai rocks.